This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, college readiness, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues with additional focus at the national level.

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Monday, May 26, 2014

End Mass Incarceration Now

This editorial by the board of the New York Times Sunday Review should serve as a sobering wake-up call to the insanity of the politics and policies that utterly—and to a great extent, arbitrarily—relegate huge swaths of our population—especially youth of color from low-income families—to the criminal (in)justice system.

Enough with reports, now. We need concerted action to stem and reverse this humanitarian crisis. -Angela

For
more than a decade, researchers across multiple disciplines have been
issuing reports on the widespread societal and economic damage caused by
America’s now-40-year experiment in locking up vast numbers of its
citizens. If there is any remaining disagreement about the
destructiveness of this experiment, it mirrors the so-called debate over
climate change.

In
both cases, overwhelming evidence shows a crisis that threatens society
as a whole. In both cases, those who study the problem have called for
immediate correction.

Several
recent reports provide some of the most comprehensive and compelling
proof yet that the United States “has gone past the point where the
numbers of people in prison can be justified by social benefits,” and
that mass incarceration itself is “a source of injustice.”

That is the central conclusion of a two-year, 444-page study
prepared by the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences at the
request of the Justice Department and others. The report highlights
many well-known statistics: Since the early 1970s, the nation’s prison
population has quadrupled to 2.2 million, making it the world’s biggest.
That is five to 10 times the incarceration rate in other democracies.

On
closer inspection the numbers only get worse. More than half of state
prisoners are serving time for nonviolent crimes, and one of every nine,
or about 159,000 people, are serving life sentences — nearly a third of
them without the possibility of parole.

While
politicians were responding initially to higher crime rates in the late
1960s, this “historically unprecedented” growth is primarily the result
of harsher sentencing that continued long after crime began to fall.
These include lengthy mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenses
that became popular in the 1980s, and “three strikes” laws that have put
people away for life for stealing a pair of socks.

And
even though the political climate has shifted in recent years, many
politicians continue to fear appearing to be “soft on crime,” even when
there is no evidence that imprisoning more people has reduced crime by
more than a small amount.

Meanwhile, much of the world watches in disbelief. A report by Human Rights Watch
notes that while prison should generally be a last resort, in the
United States “it has been treated as the medicine that cures all ills,”
and that “in its embrace of incarceration, the country seems to have
forgotten just how severe a punishment it is.”